Hello I'll be handling the critique for your lesson 5 homework.

Organic Intersections

-Starting by the organic intersections, these are wrapping around each other believably as you have kept them simple and easy to work with which is the best strategy to produce good results, as for the cast shadows you are pushing them far enough and they wrap around the surface they are falling on, helping to sell the illusion of solidity which we are looking for. And yes you should always draw through them, being a simple exercise in spatial reasoning it is always better that you draw through your forms to form a better understanding of the concepts we are exploring here

Animals

-Moving on to the animal constructions these are turning out well and there are only a few things that I want to suggest but let's go through each individual aspect of your call constructions.

-I like to see that you are relying on the additional masses a good deal and layering them on top of the initial structure and on top of each other, it is also good that you have carefully designed and wrapped the silhouette of each individual mass along the initial structure. There is one minor issue, being that your masses sometimes have sharp turns, or look like square patches. Given that we are working with organic forms it is better to draw the silhouette of our masses with an organic curve, you can see an example here.

-There is only one instance where you can make use of sharp turns, and that is when a mass is pushed onto other forms, usually the shoulder masses, this is something you do seem to be aware of, it's just that you had a tendency to draw those shoulders and hips?? masses too small.

-But the most important thing that you could do to push these exercises further is to try to draw the internal masses, you seem to be focusing mainly on the ones that directly impact the silhouette.

There's value in exploring these inner masses - like a missing puzzle piece that helps hold together the ones that create bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here's an example from the dog's leg demo, as you can see, there's blocked out masses along the masses including the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. Thinking about it this way will help you further push the value of constructional exercises and puzzles.

-Moving on to leg construction you are doing a good job here, you've drawn the legs in a way that captures both the natural flow and solidity of these limbs in equal measure, the points I have raised above also apply here, (regarding sharp corners and internal masses). When it comes to drawing the feet of your animals I like to see that you are using boxy forms to block them in which is good as it helps to differentiate the existing planes, once that structure is in place you can start to add any further details with more boxy forms, you can see a good example here, this demo also show how to apply the sharp corners to our masses.

-Now let's address head construction, in general you are moving in the right direction, and despite drawing all of those demos I do feel like the heads on your actual constructions does seem to be quite simple. The approach you want to follow is the one shown here in this page of the informal demos, you can see that the shape of the eye sockets is better off as a pentagon pointing downwards, this gives us a wedge to fit the muzzle into and a flat edge for the brow ridge and forehead. Once that is in place you can pop in some big eyeballs and draw the eyelids using additional masses that wrap around them. You can keep adding the facial features following the already existing planes of the muzzle, as you can see on the rhino head demos and the others which you have already drawn.

-And lastly keep being mindful of how you apply lineweight, keep it reserved for clarifying overlaps between forms, like two overlapping legs and such. As always do not try to apply it on marks that are too long and keep it subtle.

Okayyy, so that should be about everything I wanted to address.

Keep working on those things, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. (If a demos does not show tell me and I'll try to fix it)